Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Buy Me Some Peanuts and Cracker Jack.......

Ready the popcorn and chill the beer cuz tonight's the first game of the 2010 World Series. San Francisco is getting the home field advantage, but they're gonna need it. My money is on the Texas Rangers......for absolutely no reason, except we have friends who live in Texas. I have a Betting Buddy who's always ready to take on any bet I toss out to him, and vice versa. If you can believe it, my mother was the one who taught me how to get in there and get gutsy with throwing out a bet. She was always getting in on Series pools, and real often she took home the moolah!

My daddy was a baseball player, a lefty, or south-paw. When I was a little tyke, baseball was our Sunday afternoon entertainment. Going to local ball fields and watching daddy play baseball. He was the coolest guy ever, and I was his little Chiquita. Nobody was better than my daddy, and he'd be happy to know that I am still a fan of his favorite sport.

I'm not a sports person, really, as my friends know. Baseball and basketball are the two that I like.....unless I have a bet on the table. I'll take a bet on football, but honestly the game kind of bothers me with all that bashing and banging going on. Can you imagine those guys when they get to be my age? Migod, they'll be having every organ in their bodies replaced. When all those big lugs pile on top of one another, I lay on the couch and practically gasp for air myself.

I did a little research on the Texas Rangers (not the baseball team), and find that they were the oldest law-enforcement agency in North America. I've read about them in the Wild West novels but never actually knew very much about them. Back in the 1820s, the Texas settlers needed protection badly, and it was Stephen F. Austin (the Father of Texas) who hired ten men to act as rangers to protect the new frontier. The history of the Texas Rangers started with duties that "ranged" over a wide territory scouting the whereabouts of the renegade Indians. These "ranging" activities is how they got their name. When there was no immediate threat looming, the rangers would return home to their families. They were paid $1.25 a day and had to furnish their own horses and weapons.

The history of the Rangers is fascinating, and I think we're most familiar with The Lone Ranger. Which one of us wasn't swept up in the drama of the masked man and his devoted partner, Tonto, and the white horse Silver. I remember playing cowboys and Indians, and I always wanted to be Tonto. Maybe that's because he was an Indian.

Today's Trivia: According to legend, The Lone Ranger was the last survivor of a group of six Texas Rangers that included two of his brothers. The six Rangers were ambushed in a canyon, and the other five were slaughtered. He managed to crawl to safety near a water hole where he was found and nursed back to health by an Indian named Tonto. Tonto remembered that this surviving ranger had once saved his life, and that's why Tonto promised to stay with the "lone" Ranger and avenge the deaths of the other five rangers. Tonto supposedly made the black mask from the vest worn by one of the lone ranger's dead brothers.

About Me

Welcome to my gypsy blog. I'm devoting 2016 to taking a virtual tour around the world. Continent by continent, country by country, day by day, I plan to stop and see snips and snaps of all 197 countries on our 7 continents.
Like all tours, I'll have to decide what I want to see, where I want to stop, and what to include. At the end of the year, my blog will be made into a one-edition book.
How can one leave this world without having seen it.